The Number: Zero

Just before 11 P.M. on Thursday night, Twitter users were discussing “Sharknado,” a T.V. movie that features tornado-propelled sharks, at a rate of over five thousand posts per minute. Yet early numbers indicate that only 1.4 million or so viewers actually watched the campy, low-budget feature when it aired on the SyFy channel that night—average at best for a SyFy original movie. Despite its initial lack of viewers and low-grade content, however, the movie is almost guaranteed to be a financial success.

“Sharknado” was produced by The Asylum, a film studio largely known for its rapid and prolific production of so-called mockbusters—cheesy, low-budget takes on major Hollywood films—and cheap TV originals. The studio, which was founded in 1997, has released more than three hundred films, among them “Transmorphers,” “The Da Vinci Treasure,” and “Mega Piranha.”

The Asylum produces films briskly not only to reduce costs but also in order to ride the publicity waves of big studios; mockbusters are often timed to be released on streaming services like Netflix or networks like SyFy shortly before the real thing is released theatrically, often with a confusingly similar title. (It may be surprising that the studio is not more vulnerable to legal challenges—it has lost only one court case, over a trademark violation regarding “The Age of the Hobbits.”) The Asylum’s business model is highly tailored to video-on-demand services, like Netflix and Redbox: for instance, after realizing V.O.D. sites list movies alphabetically, it began altering the way it titles its releases, beginning with numbers and symbols whenever possible.

The films’ success ultimately depends on the idea that, as The Asylum’s chief operating officer, Paul Bales, says, “If you are a fan of giant transforming robots, you are going to find everything you can about giant transforming robots.” By this logic, a movie doesn’t have to be good to be successful. It just has to be topical.